Saturday, January 03, 2009

The California car collectors, and collections

A long and well written article that gets interviews and details.“My gut feeling is that there are more cars and collections squirreled away in California than in any other part of the country,” says Keith Martin, editor and publisher of the Portland, Ore.-based Sports Car Market magazine.“You [California] have more people with money buying cars of the ’30s and ’40s they couldn’t afford at the time. And you have a new, younger generation starting collections of what they remember: ’50s cars and the early days of the Sports Car Club of America, belly-tank racers and hot rods.

“Some of the biggest and best car collections are out there” in Southern California, says Jeff Broadus, publisher of the 56,000-circulation Car Collector magazine, headquartered in Titusville, Fla.“That will soon include the private collection of Glen Patch, who is moving his ‘57 Heaven to Palm Springs,” Broadus says, referring to his magazine’s former publisher and owner and his 70-car collection representing every American car built in 1957. “There used to be guys who collected only certain marques. Now there are multi-marque collectors.”And some California collections, he points out, have grown into museums: the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, the Blackhawk Automotive Museum in the Bay Area town of Danville and the Nethercutt Collection, founded by J.D. Nethercutt of Merle Norman Cosmetics of Sylmar.http://articles.latimes.com/1999/jul/29/news/hw-60846